The human brain wasn’t built for all this — all of the information, screens, meetings, scheduling, thinking.
The problem is the brain hasn’t changed much since the days of hunter-gatherers, but the demands we put on it have, says Kayla Stajkovic, a lecturer in organizational behavior at the University of California, Davis. In the past, humans did a fair amount of strategizing and planning to survive, but now, we’re bombarded with emails and messages all day, we juggle calendars, attempt to multitask, and pull out our phones when we can’t think of anything better to do.
Into the breach has stepped an enormous number of productivity hacks, as well as influencers and productivity evangelists peddling easy-fix solutions. A to-do list no longer suffices when you can intricately track habits, time, goals, and progress. Setting up and customizing new systems can consume more time and energy than the tasks they’re meant to streamline. We also live in an era of ubiquitous short-form videos and AI overviews, bite-sized bits of information that are supposed to save us time, but in fact may just be fueling the desire to devour more content as quickly as possible.
Even with all these new hacks, tools, and organizational methods, it can still feel like a challenge to concentrate for a few hours a day. It isn’t that we’re undisciplined or have undiagnosed ADHD (although that certainly may be the case for some) — we’re simply pushing our minds beyond the brink of what they can reasonably do, Stajkovic says. We all have a limited reserve of attention, and many aspects of our tech-laden, productivity-focused lives deplete that mental energy.
“You could see how it would be easy for people to say we have attention problems when really the problem is the environment and how much we’re trying to fit in,” Stajkovic says. “It would be like trying to tow a boat with a Honda Civic. The boat is heavier than the car’s capacity to tow it; it’s just not going to do it. It’s not a problem with the car. It just wasn’t made to tow a boat.”
If you’re already at your cognitive limit, no workaround will transform your brain from a Honda Civic to a tractor-trailer. Instead of adding, you need to do something entirely counterintuitive: find a way to lighten the load.
Overwhelmed and tapped out
This constant barrage of information we’re subjected to in modern life, most of which is delivered via a screen, leads to information and cognitive overload — a mental maxing out of attention and productivity. Because the hunter-gatherer brain has a limit on attentional capacity, modern demands chip away at those resources, Stajkovic explains. Simple, routine tasks — brushing your teeth, feeding yourself — are less mentally taxing, while blocks of meetings, hours of work without a break, and perpetual scrolling are depleting. In this exhausted state, it’s difficult to put forth your best effort.
In one study, German workers who used text-based digital tools like Slack, Trello, and email during the pandemic had higher rates of perceived cognitive overload. Video tools, on the other hand, didn’t contribute to cognitive overload.
Nothing good comes from continuing to push through despite having no gas in the tank. The consequences of cognitive overload are far-reaching, if not entirely surprising: Psychological distress, lower job productivity and satisfaction, depressive symptoms. “It impairs our working memory, it impairs our ability to make decisions and the quality of decisions we make,” says Miriam Arnold, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the University of Groningen. “It can also have behavioral outcomes, so we might try to avoid the information, for example, ignoring emails or procrastinating, which makes it worse in the long term.”
Nothing good comes from continuing to push through despite having no gas in the tank.
The drive to perpetually produce is motivated in part by the fact that productivity feels good, according to Leidy Klotz, a professor in engineering and behavioral science at the University of Virginia. Fail to meet a self-imposed (or boss-imposed) output, and you might think something must be wrong with you, not the taxing context in which you work or your employer’s demanding expectations.
The pace of work in our hyper-connected digital workplace isn’t helping matters much either. Employees are not only responsible for the central elements of their job; they’re also expected to be constantly reachable and responsive. The modern workday can feel like it’s filled more with communicating about work — answering emails and attending meetings — than actually doing the work.
Even with more busywork and tighter timelines to contend with, we’re still driven to be high-performers because of the fundamental human need to display competence, says Klotz, also the author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. Although sending another email or checking off a to-do list item gives the illusion of accomplishment, it’s only a proxy for actual productivity. It’s just energy-depleting busy work. “One of the reasons that it doesn’t feel good to be going as hard as we can and not actually accomplish anything,” Klotz says, “is because we realize that we’re not meeting that need for competence.”
In order to get more done, some may turn to productivity tools and systems — project managing software, strategies meant for people with diagnosed attention disorders, breaking down assignments into smaller tasks. While these hacks appear to streamline workflows, in actuality, they add to the cognitive load. “Say you have three things to do, and a strategy is breaking it into micro-tasks,” Stajkovic says. “Now you’ve created 26 things to do that your mind is trying to keep track of. So actually, you’re undermining yourself in that regard.”
The best way to get more done when you’ve hit your cognitive max is the most straightforward: take a break and rejuvenate, experts say.
Recognizing the signs of cognitive overload is the first step. Feeling stressed, overwhelmed, and unable to focus are signals to pull back, not force more output, Stajkovic says. In which case, try to take at least a 15-minute pause during the workday and don’t skip your lunch break. Some jobs don’t offer the flexibility to pause outside of designated break times, so Stajkovic suggests switching to a less taxing assignment if you can, something you can do almost automatically without much thinking.
Outside of work, it’s important not to sabotage leisure time. Leave work at work and save emails for the next day. Not all company cultures are amenable to this, of course, but team leaders can encourage employees to take breaks, to let their mind wander, and to disengage outside of work hours, Stajkovic and Klotz say.
To stave off cognitive overload, question some of the behaviors that contribute to it, says Gloria Mark, the author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity and the Substack The Future of Attention. Why are you responding to emails at 10 pm or opening TikTok as soon as you have a moment of downtime? Most of the time, these seemingly urgent messages can wait, or that social media habit is purely out of boredom. “Once you become aware of that, you can be more intentional in your behavior,” Mark says.
And instead of adding more to your plate in the form of elaborate productivity hacks, try eliminating what doesn’t serve you. While everyone’s scenario will look different, Klotz suggests clarifying your goal in work or life and skipping meetings or tasks that don’t serve that goal if you have the flexibility. If your main purpose at work is to teach students, maybe there are a few non-essential department meetings you could opt out of to make more time for additional instruction.
Perhaps the most impactful antidote to our fast-paced, production-obsessed culture is recognizing you probably did enough today — and nothing short of a brain upgrade can change that. “Instead of thinking about ‘What more could I do?’” Stajkovic says, “focus on what I did get done and being content with that.”
